Many of our customers are considering migrating their existing Atlassian server licenses to Atlassian Data Center, or are opting to use Data Center directly. While they are evaluating the high-availability Data Center, many customers are reluctant to consider the cost of the server solution. We would like to support you by providing answers to common questions below, and help you to better evaluate your options.

Costs of Data Center

The main issue for many customers is that Data Center is much more expensive than purchasing server licenses. On top of that, Data Center is a subscription service (the same price each year), while extending server licenses only cost 50% of the initial investment. To provide you with a better overview, the table below provides an cost comparison example for JIRA Software. (You can see full pricing details for Atlassian Data Center in our German Infothek)

Cost of Data Center per year¹

Initial license

Server

Extended licenses

Server

Comparison of Data Center cost

in the first year

Comparison of Data Center cost

from the second year

500 User

12,000 USD

18,000 USD

9,000 USD

-6,000 USD

3,000 USD

2,000 User

48,000 USD

24,000 USD

12,000 USD

24,000 USD

36,000 USD

10,000 User

240,000 USD

30,000 USD

15,000 USD

210,000 USD

225,000 USD

¹ The example assumes new licenses are purchased with Data Center. If you have existing server licenses, you may be able to migrate them to Data Center. Please contact us and we will gladly explain how much you will save.

Does Data Center justify the additional cost? Yes, but ...

As you can see in the example above, the Data Center (with the exception of the lower cost in the first year at 500 users) is already much more expensive than the server version for the initial license purchase. Due to the subscription model, when compared with the extensions on server licenses, the costs from the second year onward are higher. Is it worth it to use Data Center? Perhaps. It depends on how "business critical" the service is to you: For example, how deep Atlassian solutions are already embedded in your infrastructure or should be, and what business values are gained from it. From the following examples, you can see what questions you need to ask internally to see if it is worth taking advantage of Data Center.

High availability

Atlassian Data Center allows you to install the application on multiple servers. Up to five servers can be set up per 1,000 users. As a result, the failure of a server does not cause the entire application to fail. The traffic is distributed to the other available servers in the cluster. The question you need to answer is:

How much is your current downtime ,and what are the breakdowns (per person, cost, etc.) per hour?

Even just 30 minutes may cover the fixed costs for your personnel during an outage to justify the additional costs of Data Center.

Load distribution

You can configure the in-built Load Balancer in Data Center to distribute the load over your various serviers. For example, you can direct traffic from your users to two servers, while the other nodes deal with traffic from interfaces or re-indexing. The performance of the servers being used by your employees remains high, and is not affected by large queries. The question you need to answer is:

How well do your current Atlassian tools perform? What business value would be created if the number of operations could be increased per minute (through Data Center, a doubling of the operations per server is possible)?

Zero-downtime upgrades

You do not have any downtime in the case of a version update with Data Center. The application is upgraded server-by-server so that when you have five servers, four are always online. The question you need to answer is:

How much update-related downtime per year do you currently have, and what are the costs?

Distributed teams (for Bitbucket)

The degree of collaboration between international development teams can be greatly improved by using Bitbucket Data Center. Code retrieval can be detrimental when teams from distant countries must always retrieve the source code from German servers. Data Center allows you to set up a Smart Mirror directly at the international location. Developers can then pull the necessary code directly from the mirror, and only when the code is merged, the German server is again involved. This significantly improves performance and collaboration. The question you need to answer is:

How geographically distributed are your teams in your company, and what pain points do you have from this?

We are your Atlassian license specialist

We would be delighted to help you find the best license model for you. Whether server versions or the Data Center is right for you, is just one of the questions that you need to consider. We can answer all questions regarding your license setup and we ensure that the next steps run as smoothly as possible. Thank you for your interest in advance, and we look forward to hearing from you.